WEIMAR BRITAIN: lessons from history in radical times.
While Germany’s right saw the middle-class establishment as compromised by consensual softness, the left considered them a barrier to liberation. Artists, polemicists and others who placed themselves in the cultural vanguard sought to dismantle traditional gender roles, ridicule bourgeois values and deride patriotic attachment. Faced with assault from both radical right and revolutionary left, the political home for the middle – the Centre party – could not hold.
One of the most chilling parallels between those times and ours is that as traditional structures buckled, those who felt the pressure first, and most forcibly, were the Jewish population. Anti-Semitism is the new normal in contemporary Britain – synagogues daubed with faeces, Jewish students shunned by contemporaries on campus, Jewish goods boycotted, Jewish bodies assaulted. Musicians call for the killing of Jews from the Glastonbury stage and politicians supportive of the Jewish state are targeted by thugs. Last week it was the Labour MP Sharon Hodgson, whose constituency office was attacked. In 2021 it was Tory MP David Amess, murdered by an Islamist fanatic who had tried six times to kill me.
So the concern I feel is not performative or contrived; it is personal and profound. But there are grounds for hope. One country met the challenge of the 1930s with a restoration of faith in democracy and capitalism: Roosevelt’s America. FDR showed that if you restore agency to government, if you show you won’t be cowed by the courts and if you believe in national greatness then you can turn back the tides of despair and division. If your lodestar is ‘the forgotten man’, the citizen who has been disempowered by global forces and who you will restore to dignity, you can forge a brighter future.
There are lessons for our time – whether they be for Prime Minister Starmer, Badenoch or Farage. The institutions of government should be engines for change, not shelters for bureaucrats, ATMs for the idle or playgrounds for lawyers. The challenges differ in some respects from the 1930s, but the essence of the answer is the same – put the tools of national democracy to work for those who’ve been ignored, condescended to and impoverished by the unaccountable, the insufferable and the international.
Secure our borders, build the homes and infrastructure we need, revive manufacturing with energy abundance, reject cultural relativism, restore legitimate authority to our streets, use the state to sponsor cultural projects that cultivate pride in our nation, support democracies abroad and deny oxygen to extremists at home. That will require setting aside international conventions that have had their time, repealing EU laws that our courts have made into economic opioids, appointing to cultural institutions leaders who believe in celebrating Britain, requiring universities to be incubators of homegrown science, not finishing schools for Chinese communists, and facing down the rainbow-crescent alliance of radical leftists and revolutionary Islamists who feed on national self-doubt.
Ambitious? Perhaps. Necessary? Un-doubtedly. The reason the comparison with Weimar needs to be made is that unless democracy can respond effectively to multiplying challenges then the institutions which have kept us safe and prosperous over generations will further decay to the point where many would prefer to burn them down rather than refurbish and renew.
As Glenn has written, “The thing is, you don’t get Hitler because of Hitler — there are always potential Hitlers out there. You get Hitler because of Weimar, and you get Weimar because the liberals are too corrupt and incompetent to maintain a liberal polity.”
Earlier: Unmerrie England.
